


a shining city upon a hill

by Samizdat



Category: BioShock Infinite
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-20
Updated: 2016-12-20
Packaged: 2018-09-10 00:14:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,098
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8919037
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Samizdat/pseuds/Samizdat
Summary: Elizabeth was born with her left arm ending in a stub of bone and flesh just below the elbow. It is the reason she was abandoned as a child, or so she has been told.A strange lady and gentleman convey Booker DeWitt past a naval blockade to an island crowned by an abandoned lighthouse.In the city above the clouds, there's a war to fight. Isn't that always the way of things?





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [starlatine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starlatine/gifts).



Rain turned the equatorial waters into grey fog. The waves tossed the rowboat up to come down, slap, on the other side in a shower of spray. The air was so thick with water he could hardly distinguish it from the sea. Every breath was a choking gasp of water. His hair dripped. His coat was soaked and clammy. His mouth was full of salt.

The man and woman who sat in the bows of the rowboat did not seem to mind the monsoon, if they even noticed it. Through the hissing downpour Booker could hear them bickering, a light chatter that seemed to require neither effort nor conscious thought.

The man’s morning suit had been pressed linen before the downpour, the woman’s walking dress a pale, fine cotton. The pale cloth made them ghostly shapes against the darkness of the ocean. It was clothing singularly ill-suited to any covert exercise, yet here they were, not even night-time, a very long way from anywhere they could possibly have reason to be.

The man rowed and argued, the woman sat and argued back. Booker had been handed a bucket and instructed to bail. In the interests of his own survival, he had elected to comply.

Why had he thought this would be a good idea? Had he thought at all? It was oddly blurry in his mind. He concentrated instead on the steady fill and empty of the bucket: water over the side, empty bucket back, until his arms ached. That was a real feeling, that ache and burn of shoulders and arms. Like the salt was real, and the clammy damp of his shirt stuck to his skin. He cursed the rain, but he loved it as well, because it was the realest thing he could remember.

Above, all too close, the foghorn cried again, a mournful wail. The man at the oars took a look back over his shoulder and changed his stroke to a hard drag against their course. A cliff rose out of the night, the armoured bulk of a battleship, close enough that even in the darkness Booker could make out the details of the rivets on its armoured sides. The rain turned running lights into haloes in the dark grey of the storm as the battleship slipped past, the sea churning in its wake.

Booker stared after it, rain gasping and rattling in his open mouth. Not long ago, on a punishingly hot August day, he’d turned out along with half of New York to watch one of those ships launch. It was a dreadnought, the latest design only four years old, and its presence gave him a whole new appreciation of how badly this enterprise could go wrong.

The man put out his oars again and recommenced to row, and through the hissing rain his argument with the woman--his sister? His wife? They spoke familiarly, as of long acquaintance--turned to whose job it had been to check the navy schedules. Whose fault it was, in sum, that they had almost been caught by the blockade.

 _Blockade,_ Booker thought, dizzy. He switched abruptly from cursing the rain to cursing the suicidal loon who had decided that running a naval blockade--in a _rowboat_ , for God’s sake--would be a fine way to spend the afternoon. But that had been him, hadn’t it? He had agreed to this...measure of debt collection.

Blockade. There was nothing nearby except the island that was his destination. What was on the island that the American Navy would assign one of its precious new dreadnaughts to guard? What could be so precious, or so dangerous?

“Oh, there’s nothing on the _island_ ,” the woman said, as if he’d said it aloud, and maybe he did.

“The lighthouse is on the island,” the man corrected her. “I believe there might be a garrison, as well--”

“A _garrison_ ,” Booker began, but the lady interrupted as if he’d never spoken.

“--Somewhat reduced, these days. But there’s nothing of importance on the island.”

“Nothing much.”

“Besides the lighthouse.”

“And the garrison.”

“Oh, and the garrison,” the woman said, and wrinkled her nose. “If you insist, but I would hardly call it important.”

“Important: of great significance or value; of a person, having high rank or status; of an action, significantly original or influential,” murmured the man.

“Of little significance and no value; of no rank or status; highly unoriginal,” she sniffed, “And entirely without influence. No, I think the garrison is entirely unimportant.”

“Although,” the man said meditatively, “Significance is such a matter of perspective. I imagine the garrison may hold some significance for him.”

Both man and woman turned to Booker. Their eyes were pale, their expressions a mirror for each other, the dispassionate consideration of a scientist viewing a specimen ready for dissection. Something inhuman. He straightened under their scrutiny, though he did not quite intend to. Remembered advice from the campaigns out west: _if_ _you encounter a predator, do not run. Do not turn your back._

After a long moment, they turned back to each other, ignoring him as neatly as if he did not exist. Booker breathed out slowly and recommenced to bail.

The rain was thinning, lightening, the sky paling to a bright summer blue on the horizon. He could see the silhouette of the island, in the distance, dark rock against the sky, and the lighthouse, high on the peak, its top lost in the clouds.

* * *

Elizabeth was born with her left arm ending in a stub of bone and flesh just below the elbow. It is the reason her parents abandoned her, or so she has been told. She has lived at Fontaine’s Orphan Asylum for as long as she can remember. She’s a scrawny thing. She thinks she's eight years old; she's actually nine, but looks six. Frank Fontaine has priorities when it comes to his resources, and quality food for the orphans doesn't make the cut. They get enough to survive, but rarely enough to thrive.

Books are also rare at Fontaine's, but Elizabeth's already absorbed the lesson that knowledge makes you powerful. If you know things, you can keep from getting hurt. So she snatches free hours for study, puzzling through the words on the half-remembered lessons of a worn-down caregiver. It is a picture book, large letters and paintings in watercolour, so worn that the binding is wearing thin and several pages have fallen out and been lost to time. Elizabeth loves it because of the illustrations, particularly the bird. It is a little thing, a kingfisher, bright green-blue, with specks of rust and white, and it is the most beautiful thing she has ever seen.

She sits on the bed in the dormitory, fingers light on the illustration, and she can see a kingfisher. It is sitting in a tree (she doesn’t know, having never seen one, but the tree is a willow), head cocked as it watches the river below. It is just behind one of the thin places she can feel sometimes, a patch in the air that flutters with potentialities. She sticks her dirty fingers into the thin place and opens a tear in the skin of the universe.

The first thing she notices is the smell, a wetlands smell of heat and green rushing river water, rotting leaves and algae drying on stone. She has never smelled anything like it before. The blue of the sky is so blue it could eat her alive, and the brightness of the flowers so bright they could blind her. The wind rustles the branches, so different from the humming walls of the City. The river flows loud beneath her feet. And the bird sits on its branch, ready to dive, its movements tiny and precise. Elizabeth watches in wonder, cataloguing every motion, every movement.

She watches for so long, so absorbed, that she doesn’t hear anyone approaching until the footsteps are right outside her door. Heavy footsteps, loud--none of the children walk so loud at Fontaine’s. A caregiver, or one of Fontaine’s thugs, or Fontaine himself, and although a few of the children know about her tears, she has never shown any of the caregivers. Never shown Fontaine. When you have a skill, you must control it, or others will seek to use you; it is a truth she knows in her bones.

She snaps the tear shut with a thought, turning to the door, ready to run, and of the corner of her eye she sees the kingfisher dive--

\--as the heavy footsteps pass down the hall without entering the dormitory.

She breathes out, turns back, and nearly swallows her tongue as the kingfisher flaps into her face, shrieking an alarm.

It flails. It flaps. It makes more noise than should be possible for something so small. The City is wrong for it, the pull of the earth too light, and it spins dizzyingly in the air.

Heart hammering, Elizabeth chases it, from floor to ceiling and back again, across the bunks and up into the rafters, but it slips away again and again. The thin place it came through is gone, and Elizabeth is close to panic herself, in no state to open another. But she can’t catch the thing. It would be hard enough trying to catch a panicking bird with two hands, and Elizabeth only has one.

She finally traps the bird with a sheet from one of the dormitory beds. She cups it in her hand, holds it tight against her chest, feels the tiny heart fluttering against her fingers, the feathers so impossibly soft.

It has injured itself in its struggles and it dies while Elizabeth searches for a thin place, some way to send it home. She finds one in the end, in a dusty storeroom above Fontaine’s office. It opens into autumn in a park somewhere. She can’t savour the smells and sounds, simply lays the bird gently on the dying leaves and shuts the tear behind it, then sits on her bunk and shakes until the shaking stops.

Later she takes the book and hides it up in the rafters. Later, she cleans away the speckled blue feathers stuck to a smear of birdshit on the ground.

* * *

The sun broke free from the clouds as the rowboat rattled up the shingle beach. The heat steamed water from the man’s morning suit, from the woman’s dress, dried Booker’s clothes to salt-stiffened wrecks of leather and linen.

He took off his shoes and stepped out into the ankle-deep sea, then looked back. “Are you coming?” he asked.

“Oh no,” said the man.

“We wouldn’t dream,” said the woman.

“Just shove us off from the beach, my dear fellow, if you would. Thank you kindly.”

Booker shoved them off, trudged up onto the sand and dried his feet before replacing his boots. He allowed himself a moment’s rest before beginning to climb the winding path that leads up toward the lighthouse. The air was steamy as a Turkish bathhouse, the sun brighter than a coin in the blue.

A few turns up the track, he paused to catch his breath and turned back to the sea, squinting through the dazzle. He could see the distant specks of ships, the warships of the blockade, one, two, three. He  could not see the rowboat. It couldn’t have gone so far, he thought; but perhaps he’d gotten turned around on the steep path, and was facing in the wrong direction, perhaps…

Perhaps the rowboat was simply no longer there.

He passed outposts, rusting corrugated iron and sandbag pillboxes, aligned over switchbacks in the trail, perfect defensive positions left to ruin. Crumbling brick and concrete tangled in riotous creepers. All were empty of people. Most were empty of guns, but just below the final ridge he found two where maxim guns still stood on their tripods, mechanisms rusted stiff. Curious, he climbed the sandbags to the nests, sat in the gunner’s position, glanced through the sights. The gun had been set to face not the path that climbed up from the beach, but the path that wound down from the hill.

Above, where the hillside flattened to plateau, was a graveyard. Near fifty graves, he guessed, shallow trenches scraped out of the thin soil, cairns of stones covering the bodies. Some were adorned with a soldier’s cross, carbine planted in the earth, helmet balanced on the stock, regimental pins strung from the locks. Some he recognised. Most he did not. He checked them all, to be thorough, and was again unsurprised to find a dozen graves decorated with the yellow and blue pin of the Seventh Cavalry, an upraised fist holding a cavalry sword.

He’d pawned his regimental pins, what, eight, nine years ago, spent the money on drink, never managed to redeem them. But he wouldn't resort to grave robbing to replace them.

At the far end of the graveyard, the sweet, gagging scent of rot directed him to the newest graves, just outside the lighthouse doors. He pulled up his neckcloth and breathed through it as he neared: more soldier's crosses, the cairns pitiful affairs, barely covering the bodies. A week or two old, perhaps less. Nothing he could do for these poor souls.

A garrison's worth of carbines planted in the soldier's field like dry trees. What was it the woman had said? _Somewhat reduced, these days._

The sky had clouded over again while Booker climbed, shrouding the top of the lighthouse in drifting wisps of grey. Below, the island fell away in razor-sharp ridges and green valleys to the endless grey-green ocean, dotted with the steamships of the naval blockade. The wind came sharp and cool over the cliffs, cutting through the fug and heat of the graveyard valley.

* * *

Once a month, Fontaine shows Jeremiah Fink through the orphanage, and Fink makes his selections. The children he takes vary: one month, a handful of strong boys, the next, two brats with runny noses and a baby with a hairlip, who whistles when she breathes and gurgles when she tries to drink. Four hale girls, then a boy with only one foot, the other lost to an accident was a child, a girl born with a stub of a hand and thumb, and child with both legs ending at the knee.

Every month Elizabeth watches from above, lying full length on the air ducts that run the length of each floor, and her stomach churns, her left arm aches with cold. She makes sure Fink never sees her when he comes to make his selections. She finds hiding places and does not share them with the other children. Selfish, she tells herself, and _practical_ , her own voice whispers back. She knows the orphanage; life is not good there, but it is predictable. She doesn't know what Fink does with his hirelings, but she's never seen any of them again after he takes them away.

After Fink makes his selections, Fink and Fontaine sit together in the upper office and drink whiskey, and talk with big voices and laugh big laughs. They do not _like_ each other, but they have a business arrangement that is mutually profitable, and so they maintain a wary friendship, each on guard lest the other attempt to sabotage them.

Also once a month, Fink sends Fontaine his payment. At first, he pays in salts from his factories, bullets, mechanisms to secure or destroy. Elizabeth watches these things go into the building, and watches them get carried through by Fontaine’s thugs. They seem heavy, even in the pale gravity of the City. The thugs carry the payments up and out through a door she has never been able to unlock.

Then the lighthouse is destroyed, and everything changes. The prophet’s voice echoes over the speakers, his sermons denouncing the perfidy of the Imperfect Union and its treacherous betrayal of Columbia. Prices go up; food becomes scarce. People no longer hire Fontaine's children for odd jobs and tight spaces; the home’s income shrinks.

A man in heavy magnetic boots comes to Fontaine’s and takes measurements. He is a pale man, with pale skin and pale eyes, and Elizabeth watches from behind the bunks as he strides the halls, his boots attaching to the floor and pulling away, echoing around the bare walls. He comes back a few days later with an equally pale woman (pale skin, pale eyes) and they confer in sharp voices and leave to speak with Fontaine. Atmospheric conditions, they say. A suitable location.

Work begins on the Siphon. It is an enormous undertaking. The sector of the City between Fontaine's and Fink's factories is isolated, its residents evicted, its linking decoupled so that it stands almost independents of the surrounding City. Fontaine hires out the children to work on it, sending them across the freightlines in a stuffy old aerosphere.

The other workers appreciate their small hands and ease in the pale gravity of the inner City, although some are angry that they should work at all. “So young,” murmurs one, a frown on his narrow brown face. “Too young.”

His companion--a bastard of an Irishman, free with his fists and his temper--shrugs. “They’re orphans,” he says. “If they don’t work, what use are they to anyone?”

Elizabeth spends more time working at the Siphon than most. At night, as the new hum echoes through the walls of the orphanage, she thinks, _I helped build that,_ and is proud.

But the siphon also changes things. Because it requires stronger gravity to function than has been hitherto in place at Fontaine’s, the sector's spin is increased. The gravity pulls on her, makes her heart beat fast as a rabbit’s just to pump blood. The air is thicker, too, with a honey-blue edge to the light. It makes it harder to breathe. It makes it harder to think. It makes it harder to open tears in the City's skin.

And still Fink visits, makes his selections, takes away the children. And still he brings his payments, salts, bullets. But these things are commonplace; they are no longer sufficient payment for Fontaine.

Fontaine grows greedy. Fink’s payments change.

Bullets and salts are easy, but ever since the lighthouse was destroyed, there have been shortages. So Fink plys Fontaine with precious food, delicacies from old Earth (canned, dried, preserved in vinegar or in wine), fresh fruit and vegetables and water, precious water.

It is a charitable offering, Fink explains, when Comstock’s inquisitors come knocking. A gift for the orphans of our fair city. Fontaine concurs, his head nodding, his grin a rictus. Gifts, gifts, not _payment._ All for the orphans, no? The meek shall inherit the earth.

But little of it goes to the orphans. Fontaine takes his cut, and the thugs take theirs, as do the tired, worn caregivers. One month, one of the caregivers steals three barrels of water and vanishes. The orphans grow thirsty. They complain of headaches, their faces grow pinched and they are weak, dizzy, their urine sluggish and dark as amber.

Elizabeth steals where she can and starves when she can’t. She opens tear after imperfect tear, until her nose and eyes are bloody, but she can’t find water, and there are too many children to feed. And the children are growing ill. It is not thirst, but something different, something insidious, something that creeps through the humming in the walls and gets into their blood, into their livers and lungs. She fails, and she fails, and Fontaine only notices when his children, his precious resources, start dying.

Fontaine brings in a doctor, and the doctor does his tests and returns to Fontaine. _Cancerous growths,_ Elizabeth hears from her perch in the ceiling. _Developments, atmospheric conditions…_ a mumble from an assistant. _Common in this sector since work began on the Siphon._

And then Fink makes his monthly visit early, and Elizabeth is too tired to hide.

He picks her for her missing arm, tells Fontaine he's been making _marvellous_ progress on the new nerve attachments, my man, excellent, excellent. He grips her chin, checks her teeth. Looks at her face. Looks again. His grip tightens. “If it isn’t the Lamb herself!” Fink roars, and laughs his enormous laugh. “I had no idea she were still alive. Fontaine, my friend, have you been keeping her for yourself?” His smile is dangerous. He is dangerous. Elizabeth tugs against his grip, and it tightens until it hurts. “I thought I told you to keep her safe for me, not keep her from me.”

Fontaine smiles too. It makes his handsome face look like a skull. He protests, no, never, he never intended to keep her from Fink, only to keep her safe; but it’s obvious from his expression that Fontaine does not recognise her. Fontaine has never bothered to look at his children. They are not important, except as what they represent; salts, bullets, food and precious water. Fontaine has forgotten her. But he's wondering if he can get more for her. He essays an inquiry to that effect, but Fink doesn't bite. “Well,” Fontaine says at last, surly, “Take her, if you want, but I still expect you to uphold your end of the bargain.”

“Of course,” says Fink, “Of course.” And he hands Elizabeth over to a waiting assistant, says “Put her in the dormitories with the others.” And the assistant grips her arm tight and drags her out of Fontaine’s and into the City beyond.

* * *

It was dark inside the tower. Red and white afterimages hung in Booker's vision over the dim outlines of machinery. Dust filled rays of light slid through cracks in the boarded-up windows. The air was musty and very warm.

A room on the second floor held radio equipment. It had been state-of-the-art, once, but it looked like a tornado had been through. The cases were smashed, the crystals ground to powder. One of the tables listed, its leg splintered. A sledgehammer lay like an outsize paperweight on the transcriptions and shredded codes strewn over floor. A dented metal cup had rolled into the corner.

Cautiously, Booker stepped into the room and froze when his foot caught on an empty tin and sent it clattering across the floor. 

“Ah,” a man said, with a creaking sigh. “You’ve arrived at last.”

Booker’s pistol was in his hand. He didn’t remember taking it out of its holster. He eased back toward the stairwell, searching the shadows for the speaker. “Were you expecting someone?” he said cautiously.

A match flared, illuminating hands and a beard. The man lit an oil lamp, his movements slow and methodical. He was scraggled and ill-looking, dressed in a mismatched assortment of torn and clumsily repaired uniform pieces. His captain’s bars gleamed, but they were the only part of him that did. His skin was grimy, his hair dull. Even his eyes were sunken and flat. He shook out the match and considered its charred stub. “The blockade stopped replying to our radio messages months ago,” he said. “Granger was certain they would send someone eventually, but we grew so tired of waiting.” He fell silent, gazing sightlessly at the flame of the lamp.

Cautiously, Booker moved into the room. “Why is the island under blockade?”

“Not the island,” the captain said. “The lighthouse. The City.” Booker could hear the capital letter in the emphasis: not city, but City. The man reached out a slow hand and tapped a piece of paper on the desk. “Not a blockade; a siege. Until the prophet relinquishes his claim to Columbia, he will receive no more food, no more water, no more supplies to maintain and create his city in the clouds. His people will starve, unless he admits his error and submits to the judgement of the Union.” His voice faded away as he spoke, until the last words were barely a whisper. Then his voice strengthened. “But you would know that, if you came for us. Who are you?”

“I’m,” Booker began, and stopped as the captain’s hand wandered across the desk and into a drawer and came up with a pistol. “You don’t want to do that,” he warned, raising his own gun.

The captain pulled out a rag and began to dismantle the pistol, laying each piece carefully on the desk as he did so. “We didn’t have boats, and the blockade was too far out for us to swim,” he said. “Granger tried. Then there was drought, and the water barrels ran dry. It takes so long to filter salt from the seawater, and we were crazed with hunger. Johnson began speaking of Ascension. He was using the lighthouse to contact the City, although that was forbidden. I told him so, I told him it skirted dangerously close to treason and I would be forced to act. The words of the false prophet turned him to unrighteousness. He forced my hand. Too many followed him. I warned him… but it came to fighting in the end.”

The gun dismantled and the pieces clean, the captain reassembled it, his creaky voice still wandering through his tale. “It was for nothing, since we none of us possessed the key, and without it the lighthouse is nothing more than an empty tower. All for nothing, and less than nothing.” The captain loaded the chambers, spun the cylinder, and emptied them again. He lined the bullets neatly on the desk, then loaded one chamber, giving the cylinder an extra spin.

“Look, I don’t understand, so just tell me,” Booker said, though he was becoming increasingly certain that the captain wasn’t even speaking to him, but to someone in his own head. “What the hell’s so important about this island that you’d start a war with your own men over it?”

The captain smiled. His gums were bloody with scurvy. “As the City was besieged, we were quarantined,” he intoned, “For we have been exposed to the contagion of the spirit spread by the corrupt ideals of Columbia’s prophet. We know about the City, so we will never be permitted to leave the Island. But we can escape. We can escape.” The captain had been turning the revolver over in his hands. He raised it to his temple and pulled the trigger.

The gun clicked on an empty chamber.

Booker swore and lunged forward, but the captain screwed his eyes shut and pulled the trigger again, again, again, until it caught on the single chambered bullet. Blood splattered. The captain slumped, knocking the oil lamp from the table.

The flame flickered and died. It left blue afterimages in Booker’s eyes.

* * *

Fink makes Elizabeth a new arm. It hurts.

His surgeons carve open her stump and attach wires and fittings, inject liquids and chemicals into her blood. They do not care that she is awake throughout; in fact, they prefer it. It allows them to test her reflexes and the responses of the new technology.

“You’re very lucky,” one of the surgeons tells her. He is chatty, barely pauses for breath. “You're getting the mature technology, not the prototypes. They were clumsy machines. This is a thing of beauty! I wouldn't mind one of these myself. Though--” he laughs, “I wouldn't want to pay the price.”

Elizabeth does not respond. Her voice has gone hoarse from screaming; now she can only pant, harsh gasps of pain.

“Ah,” the surgeon says. “Now, this part is quite tricky. Do hold still.”

Afterwards, Fink's men return Elizabeth to her dormitory. She cannot lift her arm, the weight of the prosthetic dragging on her, the weight of the City dragging on her further.

She lies still, and tries to rest, and listens to the click and whir of it.

It is clumsy at first. It will learn from her, the surgeons said, from her firing neutrons, from electrical pulses in her veins. But it has not learned yet. It twitches, metal fingers curling and uncurling, the servos humming just on the edge of hearing. She breaks a plate, breaks a door handle, breaks a door off its hinges. The new arm is powerful. She wonders if Fink realises he’s given her a weapon.

The arm learns, as promised. It takes time. Finally, the surgeons pronounce themselves satisfied and bring her in to see Fink. Fink is not interested in pain, only in function. He throws her golf balls, paperweights, has her catch them in her new hand. Then an egg. She's never _seen_ an egg before, not fresh, but she knows how easily they break.

She doesn't break it. Fink nods, doesn’t smile. He gives her a clock, tells her to fix it; a gun, tells her to strip it. He tests how much weight she can carry, how much pressure she can exert. By the end of Fink's tests, Elizabeth is swaying with fatigue and Fink is grinning. “By my hands are the crippled made whole,” he says. “Hallelujah. Tomorrow, little lamb,” he adds, all teeth and nails, “We'll see about a place for you on a work crew.”

Elizabeth blinks at him, exhaustion and pain weighing heavier than gravity. “Work crew?” she echoes.

“Oh yes, girl. You didn't think this was free, did you?” He chuckles at the joke. “You'll be working a long time to wipe away the debt you owe me.”

* * *

 

“Hey. Hey, girl.” The Handyman’s voice was distorted by his helmet, a brass half-sphere like a deep-sea diver’s suit. “You’re one of Fontaine’s brats, aren’t you?”

They are perched on the gallery overlooking one of Fink’s production lines. Technically it’s not a break: Fink’s foremen are not big on breaks, so the workers have to snatch them when they can; when the foreman’s away, or the equipment they need is fetched or fixed, or in out of the way corners. Today, they all get a break of sorts, because the crew fixing the catwalks broke the only door to the level they’re on, and they can’t get down. Their foreman is at the other end of the gallery, screaming at the foreman of the other crew, who is screaming back. Over it all, the clamour of the machinery; over that, Fink’s jovial voice coming through the speakers, extolling the virtues of work. Elizabeth hasn’t heard Comstock’s sermons since she came to Finktown.

“Lisa,” he says. “No. Eliza?”

“Elizabeth.” She squints at him. “Who are you?”

“The name’s Ty,” the handyman says, and this time she catches the edges of his accent, a southerly drawl. “Ty Bradley. I worked with you on the siphon.”

Elizabeth’s worked on crews with Handymen before, but this is the first time one has spoken to her. She hadn’t even been sure they _could_ speak; hadn’t been sure there was still a person inside suit and exoskeleton that cover him from neck to ankle. It is fully articulated and pressure-rated; the engine over his chest glows like a furnace. She essays a cautious nod, stays out of his reach.

“The siphon got me,” Ty Bradley says quietly. “Cancer, all up in my stomach and lights. I’ve got metal in me now, gears and chains. The siphon get you too, Elizabeth?”

“Not the siphon,” she says. “Just Fink.” But she comes a little closer, hunkers down beside him. “I remember you. You stopped that bastard paddy from beating up on little Ned Fumblefingers.”

He hums, shifts. The gallery creaks under him. “If I recall me rightly, you’ve a delicate touch with that hand of yours.” He points to her flesh hand with a metal finger almost as wide as her wrist. “Think you could help a brother out?”

One of the other workers spits a gob of chewing tobacco over the railing and says, “You want to leave those things alone, girl. They’re barely human anymore.”

Elizabeth ignores him. “What do you want?” she asks Ty.

“There’s something loose in my suit,” he explains. “Just by the back of my shoulder. It hurts.”

Elizabeth thinks about it. Sneaks a glance at the foreman, still yelling away. Ty Bradley doesn’t say anything more. Doesn’t try to persuade her. Just keeps his head down, the helmet turned slightly towards her, face lost in the faceplate’s reflections.

“Well,” she says. “Alright.”

When she unbolts the outer shell of Bradley’s exoskeleton, the skin she reveals is chapped and greyish, ill-looking. The inner part of the suit is attached to his nerves and bones, all down his spine, the connections angry and painful. The loose fitting has rubbed his shoulder raw, and pus seeps from the edges of the wound. Elizabeth hasn’t got any bandages, but she tightens the loose fitting as far as it will go and washes the wound with a little of her precious water. Bradley’s breathing hitches, the iron lung of his suit hissing as it compensates.

“I said leave it, girl.”  Tobacco-chewer’s voice is sharp. “Fink don’t like it when people play with his toys. Want to know what he’ll do to you?”

The other Handyman on their shift is watching. She can’t read anything in the tilt of his helmet. So is the rest of the work crew. Elizabeth eyes them, but no-one’s going to interfere with her. Or with Tobacco-chewer, worse luck. She gives him a cheerful smile. “Fink’s already had a go at me,” she says, waves her metal fingers at him.

He swears at her and retreats to the railing. “Monsters, the both of you.”

The foreman returns as she’s bolting the outer shell back on. “What in hell do you think you’re doing?” he says. “Leave the damned thing alone and get back to work.”

“I can’t leave him now,” she says. “Until I put the rest of the bolts in his chassis he’s not pressure safe.”

“So put the bolts in.” The foreman’s voice is dangerous. Elizabeth has a sudden image of the immediate future: this foreman has a temper, like the bastard Irishman who worked on the siphon. He won’t hurt her while she’s fixing the Handyman, because no-one else will dare touch it, and if the chassis isn’t repaired he’ll have to explain himself to Fink. She’s safe as long as Bradley’s armour is undone, but as soon as she tightens the last bolt she’s in for it.

Her old hand trembles. Her new hand can’t, but its grip slips and the wrench hits Bradley’s chassis. It rings like a bell, and his breathing hitches again. Her heart is pattering like the kingfisher’s, so long ago.

Bradley shifts slightly, his hand dropping to touch her booted foot, so lightly she barely notices; his head turns just a little, and the reflection on his faceplate clears enough for her to see his thin brown face through the thick glass. It’s lined with pain, but kind. Like she remembers it.

Her breathing steadies. She fixes the last bolt down and steps away. As soon as she’s clear the foreman grabs her wrist, his other hand coming around for a blow. Bradley doesn’t seem to move, but suddenly he’s in between her and the approaching fist. The blow doesn’t even make a dent in his armour, but the foreman’s knuckles are bloody when he pulls away.

“Best we get back to work, yes?” Bradley says calmly.

* * *

 

Working for Fink has few virtues, in Elizabeth’s experience. Working for Fink means long hours for pittance paid, wages docked for materials and tools, wages docked for illness, for coming in under quota, wages docked--always--to pay for the prosthetic she never had a chance to refuse. It means scarcity. It means hunger. It means thirst.

Fink doesn’t like others to play with his toys, and he doesn’t bother to fix them until they’re truly broken. But Elizabeth has a hand, hah, for machines, and she keeps her own hands oiled and working, replaces parts as they wear out, even makes a few improvements. She does the same for the other benefactors of Fink’s charity. Ty Bradley is the first, but by no means the last. Her reward comes as a cup of water here, a handful of beans there, lemons to ward off scurvy, oats to fill her belly. Little thanks, but all the more precious when it is all anyone in debt bondage can afford.

Her reward is that at seventeen she finally has a strong enough body for menarche to begin.

With her blood, the tears return.

They appear around her, staticky slits through which can be seen other realities, other worlds. Her workcrew can see them too. They are distracted, twitchy, jumpy. “It’s like the Lutece machines,” one woman murmurs. “Those holes they uses to bring up food and water.”

“But there’s no machine,” argues a man, “What’s doing it if there’s no machine?”

“If we knew, maybe we could get food and water for ourselves.”

“If we knew, maybe we could escape.”

Elizabeth hunkers down and stays silent. When you have a skill you must control it, or be used for it. But she betrays herself in the end.

Her work crew is suited up and sent outside the City to make repairs on the framework of the city itself. In suits and vacuum, nothing but metal and canvas against the vast blackness of space. Below and above without even the meaning given by the City’s partial gravity. Only the city, and the lighthouse cable, and far, far away, a shield of blue and white, the earth.

Their pressure suits don’t have radio. The only communication is through gesture. So she doesn’t see what happens, only turns around when the worker next to her thumps her shoulder. And there are three of her crew, harnesses slipped, spinning wildly through black space. She recognises among them the bulky shape of a Handyman, the only Handyman working her crew, one of the few workers she'd call friend. The sun in her eyes, horror in her heart--they are already too far from the station to be caught, already doomed to slow death--she squints against the light and sees:

On the edge of her vision, the static shimmer of a tear.

Through it, a twisting halo of the freight-cables that circle the City, spread broad across the expanse.

So she opens the tear and pulls them into existence around her workcrew. And out in the expanse Ty Bradley and the other two grab onto the instrument of their salvation and hold it fast.

They finish the shift. An accident is not sufficient reason to cut work short unless there are bodies to clear away, so sayeth Fink. But on their return to the City the crew is silent, spooked, sneaking glances each way. Elizabeth's nose is bleeding, her head filled with throbbing pressure. It's the largest thing she's ever brought through, and she only managed it because their repair crew was a long, long way from the Siphon.

Down the corridors from airlock to factory floor they walk, and a hand the size of her body catches Elizabeth's shoulder. Ty presses down, not enough to hurt but enough to hold her in place as the rest of the crew walks on. “Did you do that?” he asks. She can hear the strain in his voice even through the distortion of his helmet. “You did that. You're the one been salting the factory with those creepy windows. Have you always been able to do that?”

“All my life,” Elizabeth whispers. It's a relief to finally tell someone.

She can't make out his expression through the glass, but she's learned to parse his body language these last years. He's shocked, but more than that, he's thinking. “Right,” he says abruptly, and sets off after the others, tugging her after him. But outside the factory he turns her away from the dormitories. “Daisy's got to see this,” he tells her.

She protests. Even though she's wanted to meet Daisy Fitzroy for years, she can't quite stop herself. “I've only got eight hours before my next shift starts, Ty. I need to _sleep._ ”

“Don't you see, girl?” He glances at her. “Well, maybe you don't. But whatever them things are that you do, you might be the one chance we have to finally get our war won.”

* * *

The aerosphere climbed on its cable like a spider on a rope. It climbed for an hour, and the island was a speck below. It climbed until night, and sunset stained the water purple and orange. It climbed through the night. The speed of its ascent pressed Booker against the seat.

He found supplies in a cupboard, cans of meat and jam, musty water, sour wine. He slept uncomfortably, woke in the night inside a storm. Wind dragged at sphere and cable, set them resonating like plucked guitar strings, too deep a note to be heard. Lightning crawled and jumped over the metal fixtures of the sphere, blinding and beautiful.

He didn't remember falling asleep again, but he awoke to dawn _above_ the clouds, and still the sphere climbed. For another day and a night it climbed, until gravity lost its grip and the sky became a blue layer around the edge of the earth, and he saw stars in daylight.

And one star, looming out of the darkness at the end of the tether, revealed itself to be not a star at all, but a city, lit pale and elegant by the morning sun.

It was a shining web of steel and glass. Like the skyscrapers of New York, laid out sideways around a Ferris wheel wider than Manhattan. Booker spent the last days of his approach gaping at the sheer size of it, the audacity of man to build a city so close to heaven. The earth's pull absent, he floated in the aerosphere as he might in a warm salt sea. Nothing--not the island, nor the lighthouse, nor even the graveyard or the captain's suicide--felt real in the face of that glittering, man-made star.

It grew in the window until it eclipsed the pod, and the ribbon of the lighthouse cable entered an arched portal into the heart of Columbia.

* * *

Daisy Fitzroy has the most piercing eyes Elizabeth has ever seen. She watches as Elizabeth opens tear after tear, bringing through curiosities: a fresh leaf, a loaded gun, a pat of butter wrapped in grease paper, a potted aspidistra, a pair of lace gloves.

Her intent stare reminds Elizabeth forcefully of the time Fink tested her new arm, but there the resemblance ends, because Daisy talks to her, asking questions, prompting her responses. Elizabeth find herself telling her about Fontaine's, the children who died because of the Siphon, the salts and bullets smuggled into Fontaine's back rooms. She even tells Daisy about the kingfisher, how soft the feathers were, how it trembled in her hand.

Daisy tells her about her life, here in the bowels of the City. Finkton, they call it, for the workers and the factories, but Fink wouldn’t last five minutes in these sectors. The air is bad here, the fans broken, the ventilation shafts clogged. Workers don’t have the luxury of even the City’s half gravity. Their bones are fragile, their muscles weak. Same old story, Daisy says, and remembering Fontaine’s, Elizabeth has to agree.

Food’s scarce, and getting scarcer. But you don’t ever see Fink and his men going hungry, Daisy points out. It’s because they control access to the Siphon, and to the Lutece machines that bring food into the stranded city. We’re all dependent on Fink for that, Daisy says. All of us except you.

Imagine what we could achieve if we didn’t have to rely on the Siphon, Daisy says.

In a way, it’s everything Elizabeth’s ever dreaded. Fitzroy wants to use her, just like Fink, just like Fontaine. Elizabeth’s means to an end, but she likes Daisy’s ends better.

And unlike Fink, unlike Fontaine, Daisy doesn’t take without asking.

They go to war.

Elizabeth is kept back from it all. The tears are too important to the Vox for her to risk her life striking in the streets, or fighting against Fink’s security men and his automata, his blacklegs and scabs. She opens tear after tear, searching for food and ammunition, and afterward rests in a darkened room until the throbbing in her head subsides.

Comstock doesn’t speak on the radio anymore. His broadcasts are all recycled from old recordings, old sermons. And Fontaine doesn’t speak either, though he’s struck out against both Fink and Fitzroy, taking advantage of their battles to stake his own claim on the City. The broadcasts don’t tell her anything about the fight. She gets that from Ty or Daisy when they visit. She gets it from the wounded men and women sent back to recover, their red scarves and ribbons stained brown with drying blood. She gets it from Daisy’s military folk, the old soldier called Slate with death in his one eye, and the hard-faced Vivian Monroe.

It’s not going well. Even with Elizabeth to even the odds against the Siphon, they’re deadlocked at the gates to Fink’s factory, at the doors of Comstock’s manor. The death toll rises, the children running messages begin to disappear, and all Elizabeth can do is stay locked up in her tower, like a bird in a cage. And Daisy grows desperate. Desperate and dangerous.

Then the impossible happens, and the sweet, chilly bells of the lighthouse sound again in the city. Elizabeth looks up from the wounded man she’s bandaging. Across the room, the walking wounded are struggling to their feet, eyes wide.

Daisy puts down her gun. “The lighthouse,” she says, wonderingly. “I thought it was destroyed.” Then she smiles. It’s a hard expression, all edges. “Seems like that was another lie, doesn’t it?”

* * *

The pod docked with a click and a shudder that rippled through its hull. The door opened on creaking hinges, gummed by years’ accumulation of salt and corrosion. Booker pulled himself into a position that was more-or-less upright and floated over to the door.

His first impression was of a soaring cathedral of light. Glass and steel stretched and mirrored, kaleidoscope shadows and shapes of chrome, black space and merciless sunlight.

His second impression was of the cacophony of silence, echoing and vast.

His third impression was actually a realisation, and it was this:

He didn’t know where up was, and suddenly every direction seemed to be down. Dizzy, he lost his grip on the pod’s door, then snatched it again, terrified most of all that he would end up drifting, marooned within sight of shore.

It took far longer than it ought to for him to find the gold-limned exit door in the silver and grey. In the end he curled his legs up under his chest, took a deep breath and shoved himself off towards it, gliding dazed through the air. He landed with a thump that rattled his bones, a little to the side (or possibly below) the door, and pulled himself along by the framework of the dome.

On the other side of the door was war.

* * *

Nearly two days after Slate takes the Vox to the lighthouse, the straggling remnants of his soldiers return. A few dozens, where hundreds set out, bleeding, dying on their feet. They look exhausted. They look defeated.

“It was a trap,” Slate growls. For all that his people are dead, he is smiling, a grim smile, but oddly joyous. “Fink knew we couldn’t stay away, and he was waiting.”

“You mean the lighthouse truly is broken?” Elizabeth asks.

“Not exactly.” Slate beckons, and two of his soldiers move forward with a stranger between them, a lean man, oddly clumsy in his movements, like he was used to magnetic boots. “I ran into an old friend.”

A stranger, Elizabeth realises, clumsy like a man who has lived his life on solid ground.

The stranger’s name is Booker DeWitt, and he fought beside Slate before either of them came to the City.

The stranger’s name is Booker DeWitt, and he won’t stop watching Elizabeth.

His eyes caught on the shining chrome and brass fittings of her arm first, startled, then assessing. But then they rose to her face, and they haven’t left since. Daisy has noticed, and from the way her eyes have narrowed, she’s already thinking of some way to make use of it. Ty Bradley has noticed, his helmet tilting ever so slightly as he examines the man, then Elizabeth. Even Slate has noticed, although it’s hard to tell if he cares.

They are going to take Fink's factory, or die trying. Elizabeth’s not sure if it’s wise, but she can’t see another way.

The stranger is here on Slate’s say-so. Elizabeth is not sure if that’s wise, either.

The discussion goes loud, and late, but in the end Slate and Daisy set out their plan and everyone else has to agree. DeWitt says little, but near the end of the meeting, he speaks up. "Why not just leave?" he says. “The lighthouse wasn't destroyed. Why not just take it back to earth? Blow the cable after you're down, if you want, and leave this Fink and his people to rot in orbit. It seems a lot of people will die, if you go through with this.”

“People are already dying,” Daisy tells him. “The only question is whether it's gonna be us or them. We take the factory or we die. Simple.”

“Simple,” Elizabeth echoes as the meeting disbands. Uneasy about this whole venture, made more so by the fact that for the first time since their war began, Daisy’s sending her out on this trip. If the Siphon is destroyed, but Elizabeth is killed, what will become of the people of Columbia?

DeWitt catches her up just outside the door. “Look,” he says. “You all know the lighthouse works, now. Why are you all so hell-bent on fighting this fool war? Why can’t you just leave? People weren’t meant to float around like balloons. We were made to walk on solid ground.”

“This is my home,” Elizabeth tells him coolly. “Whatever else it might be.”

“Don’t you want to visit Earth? You could go anywhere. New York, or Paris--you don’t need to die fighting for this godforsaken hunk of metal in the sky.” He slams his hand against the bulkhead. She sees the scar on it, _AD_ faded almost to white against the worn, brown skin. His hands are older than the rest of him. Hard to believe, looking at his face, that he’s not much younger than Slate. But his hands tell the truth of him.

He wants something from her. No other reason he’d insist so on taking her away. But if he’s half the soldier Slate claims, the Vox need him. And Elizabeth--well, Elizabeth’s always been a good student, and her teachers have been Frank Fontaine, Jeremiah Fink, and Daisy Fitzroy. “You do this for us first,” she tells him. “Then I’ll go with you.”

He takes the deal--and the point--with a scowl. But he does take it.

* * *

Slate died as they broke down the factory doors. A stray bullet through his neck, and he bled out in seconds. Monroe's daughter rallied the rest of the soldiers, while the mob swept them forward, into the factory proper. The metal man, the one they called a Handyman, died not long after, his glowing heart shattered by a sniper's shot. Booker might be clumsy in this floating world but he could still shoot straight: the sniper went down not long after, his body going slack and falling like a feather from the upper gallery of the factory.

The girl was less shocked by it all than Booker had expected. For all that she had the thin, tough face of a child grown old before her time, he’d thought she’d be useless in a fight. But she knew how to use the gun she carried. She might not be a soldier, but he couldn't fault her courage, and she moved through the pathetic excuse for gravity like she was born to it.

* * *

The first chance Elizabeth gets to breathe is, by some ill chance, in the same room where, years ago, a team of surgeons tore her arm apart and put metal in it. It still smells like it did then, of antiseptic and blood; although the gunpowder is new.

New, too, are the bound forms of Jeremiah Fink and his young son, guarded in the corner. Fink's son is crying silently. Elizabeth watches him, her pity mingling with scorn. Even the smallest children at Fontaine's knew better than to waste water on tears.

Fink has already spilled his rage in pleas, threats, and incoherent rage, and now he sits and pants, his eyes full of murder. But he can't do anything. Every so often, members of the Vox will come by and spit on the man, or kick him, or pour into his ears all the invective that has kept them warm these past years and decades. Fink struggles against the ropes, but they don't give. The rope is rough, and his skin is already worn raw. He cannot ease his own pain, and Elizabeth is struck by the memory of patient, gentle Ty Bradley, unable to make repairs to his exoskeleton as it bled him dry.

Fink raises his head and catches her eye. She doesn't look away. After a moment he gives a little laugh like a cough. "Well," he says hoarsely, "If it isn't the Lamb herself."

Elizabeth crosses the room to crouch in front of him, metal hand resting lightly on her knees, flesh hand on her gun. “I never did ask," she says. "Why do you call me the Lamb?”

Fink turns his head and spits, an oddly neat movement for all it leaves flecks of bloody spittle at the corners of his mouth. "Wouldn't you like to know?" he says.

Elizabeth eyes him levelly. "That's why I'm asking," she says.

He looks away.“Comstock,” he says, grudgingly. “Back in the day, Comstock decided he wanted an heir. The miracle child, he said.” Fink gives another little coughing laugh. “Comstock was barren, or maybe Lady Comstock was. But one day he turned up with a baby, just like that. A little thing you were, but noisy as a siren. Comstock said you’d be his heir, but that didn’t work out, did it? And then the Fitzroy woman killed Lady Comstock, and he came to me and asked me to get rid of you. Take you someplace he didn’t have to see you anymore.” He grins, teeth bloody. “What was I supposed to do with a brat? I gave you to Fontaine. I figured you’d died long ago.”

"And where is Comstock?"

"Haven't you heard? Comstock's dead."

"Dead?"

Comstock is dead. Comstock abandoned her, and Comstock is dead. She feels hollow, suddenly, like not even the partial gravity of Fink's offices can keep her still.

"He got drunk and put a bullet through his mouth. But he was already dying. Cancerous growths, just like the Siphon workers. He'd have been dead within a decade anyway."

Fink's gloating satisfaction is too much for Elizabeth. She stands and turns away.

"You should be  _grateful_ ," Fink hisses at her back. "You were nothing when I found you. And orphaned brat, crippled, _useless._ Everything you are today, you are because of me.  _I_ gave you that arm.  _I_ made you whole again."

"I never wanted it!" Elizabeth yells. "I never asked for it!" There are tears stinging in the corners of her eyes, tears flickering in the corners of the room. She rips open the nearest, and for a moment the room is filled with stinging hailstones the size of marbles, coating the floor is shining white. The cold yanks the air from her lungs and she gasps, loses hold of the tear. It slams shut. "I have  _never_ been nothing." Her voice is shaking.

The Vox are watching, wide-eyed. 

"I have never been nothing," she whispers, and retreats to the hall.

DeWitt is standing in the doorway, only the whites of his eyes showing how startled he was by her loss of temper. She pushes past him, storms out into the corridor. There's a body there, one of Fink's foremen. That one had been decent enough, as foremen went. But he was dead all the same.

* * *

She finds Daisy. "Are we done here?" she asks. "Because there's something else we need to do."

Daisy has never looked more tired. "What's that?"

"We need to take care of Fontaine."

Daisy doesn't say anything for a long minute. Then she sighs, out through her nose, and says, "We can't."

"What do you mean 'we can't'?" Elizabeth demands. "We're done here. We keep going."

"We can't. We need to wait, to treat the wounded, to eat and drink. We need to rest, girl."

"You don't know Fontaine like I do," Elizabeth argues. "He's been stockpiling food and weapons since I was five years old. If he wants to, he can hole up in his sectors and hold the rest of us off until Judgement Day. And he may or may not have a Lutece Device, but he's close enough to the Siphon that he can cut us all off if he wants."

"What do you want me to do?" Daisy spits the words.

Elizabeth says, "Let me destroy the Siphon."

Slate has been arguing for this from the beginning. Daisy has always preferred the option of capturing it intact. They have never been able to agree. Now Slate is dead, they never will.

“If we destroy the Siphon, even if he has a Lutece devices it won't work. Then he won't be able to steal food and supplies from Earth. We'll be on equal terms at last. Well,” Elizabeth adds, “Almost equal. We can rebuild the Siphon after, when the city is ours. If we destroy the Siphon, then _we'll_ have the advantage. _We’ll_ have the power to say who lives and who dies.”

Sometimes, Daisy is almost as hard to read as a Handyman. She tilts her head, her voice almost meditative, “Not long before I met you, when the Siphon and the Lutece devices still governed us all and there seemed no end in sight, in the darkness of my despair two white folk came to me, promising an end to the horror of the City. Do you know the price they demanded of me, girl? They came to me, pale man and pale woman with pale animal eyes, and promised me the City would burn, and Comstock and Fink would pay for all their sins, if I made you into a killer.”

Elizabeth can't say anything.

“They said you would come to me a girl, but you must leave a woman. And what makes the difference between a girl and a woman?”

“Blood,” Elizabeth whispers.

“Blood,” Daisy repeats. “Blood seen, blood spilled, blood shed. You’ve done all three, now. I never needed to make you a killer. You did that all by yourself.” She shakes herself once, all over. "Alright. You go. Take DeWitt. Don't argue," she says, when Elizabeth opens her mouth. "You might not trust him, but he might be able to see you through this alive. If you succeed, and the Siphon goes, we're going to need you."

* * *

Here is a truth about the Siphon: it cannot be switched off, disabled or brought offline, and any sabotage sufficient to halt its working would also be sufficient to cause catastrophic failure, resulting in the machine's destruction, and likely also in the death of the saboteur.

Once DeWitt learns this, he objects. Strenuously. They argue about it as they fight their way past outposts of Fink's guards who haven't got the news that they've already lost. They argue about it as they discover the aerosphere there has been sabotaged and they have to find another route. They argue about it as the skirt around the edges of Fontaine's territory to another sector airlock, and they argue about it as they find another sabotaged aerosphere, and they argue about it as Elizabeth leads him through the tangled maze of Fontaine's territory. Her old routes still work; Fontaine's men are too attached to their magnetic boots and false gravity to pay attention to what goes on above their heads. They even argue, in whispers, as they raid Fontaine's stores for pressure suits, resulting in their discovery, and the sudden wailing of an alarm, high overhead.

They argue about it as they fight their way out of Fontaine's territory. They argue about it in the airlock. They don't argue about it on their way from Fontaine's sector to the Siphon, but only because the suits are Fink's budget models and don't contain radio headsets.

Their argument picks up again where it left off in the airlock of the Siphon's tower. “You don’t have to do this,” DeWitt insists. 

“Yes, I do,” Elizabeth says. “I told you, this is my home. I have to fight for it. You’re the only one who ever had a choice in this.”

"You have a choice. I told you, we can go anywhere. We can go to New York--"

“You can’t take me to New York,” she says.

“So I can,” he says. “I can knock you out and bring you home stuffed in a sack if need be, girl, and believe me, I’ll do it. I’ll do anything I need to.”

“You can’t take me to New York,” she says, flatly, and finally admits the real reason: “If you do, I’ll die.”

That gives him pause, as she thought it might. She can almost hear him thinking: she isn’t speaking out of panic or despair. Isn’t threatening to kill herself. “What do you mean,” he says, flat. “What do you mean, you’ll die.”

“I lived in the City my whole life,” she says, patient, wondering if he can hear the capital letter. Not city, City. “Humans are adaptable things, did you know that? I have adapted to the partial gravity of the City. If you take me to Earth, the weight of her would press down on my body until my heart struggles to pump blood, until my bones break and my limbs collapse. If you take me to New York, I will die.”

“You promised you'd come if I helped you destroy the siphon,” DeWitt says. "Did you want to die?”

“We needed you to get to the siphon,” she says. “I don't want to die. But you're not the only one who'll do whatever they have to to get what they want. You think Daisy and me can just walk away from this fight? You're the only person in the City who _ever_ had that choice.”

“Maybe,” Booker says. “Maybe. Maybe you're right about that much, at least.” He moves aside, gestures her ahead of him.

As she passes him, she sees him move. But she's too slow to dodge the blow he gives her. Dazed--never truly unconscious--she drops. Through the throbbing pain in her head, she sees Booker check the seals on her pressure suit, almost throws up when he lifts her and walks to the airlock. He pushes her away from the siphon, towards the distant shape of the City, and turns back to the tower.

In the black emptiness of space, Elizabeth drifts, weeping silently. She waits as the tears dry on her cheeks, and waits some more. The tether that connected her to the City floats loose in a curlicue. From this angle it looks like a signature, a mark on the universe, to say _I was here_.

She watches the airlock, but as long as she watches, Booker DeWitt does not come back through it. 

When the siphon detonates, it does so in silence, blue and white, blinding. It feels like the world ending.

Elizabeth watches it, then watches the afterimages in the inside of her eyelids, wondering how success can feel so much like failure, how triumph can be so devastating. She is drifting further from the City by the minute, but as the last firefly splutters of electricity shudder through the wreckage of the Siphon, she can feel the universe opening up around her.

In one universe, Elizabeth dies as the Siphon detonates, and the shuddering blast of energy and shrapnel tears through her pressure suit like buckshot through wet paper. In one universe, Elizabeth bleeds out on the factory floor. In one universe, she cuts Fink's throat as his son watches. The blood runs warm and wet over her fingers, and she reflects that Daisy was right: no-one ever needed to make Elizabeth into a killer. She did that all herself.

In one universe, Booker DeWitt knocks her out and takes her to the lighthouse, only to watch as her bones shatter and her lungs fail in the face of cruel gravity.

In one universe, Elizabeth drifts in the sky until she dies. But that is not this universe; in this universe, there are still battles to fight. Frank Fontaine has ambitions that not even the destruction of the Siphon can contain, and Daisy Fitzroy is a revolutionary, not a governor. There will be problems to be solved, difficulties to overcome. She has only to reach out to return to the shining spires of the City.

 

In this universe, Booker DeWitt dies before Elizabeth ever learns the truth. She watches as her sister-selves drown him deep beneath the waters of the river.

Water is more precious than gold, here above the clouds, but she can have anything she wants, now. She only has to open a tear and reach through. It tastes like air, like cold metal. She drinks until the water feels hard, like she’s swallowing marbles, like acid, like swallowing glass. She wonders if this is what it is like to drown.

In this universe, Comstock drinks himself to death before Booker DeWitt ever comes to Columbia.

Later, Elizabeth finds a box of wax cylinder recordings, the prophet’s own words. _My lady dead, my city abandoned to the cruel mercy of the Lord; without an heir, nor hope of my legacy,_ the prophet murmurs, his voice made unfamiliar by a rough edge of despair. _Where now is the destiny I was promised? Even the child--_ He sighs. _She is not perfect,_ he mumbles, petulant, a child himself. _I thought she would be perfect_.

 _Father._ She sits in the wreckage of the City and turns the thought over in her mind, trying to find a way to make it fit.

 

**Author's Note:**

> This thing wanted to be a monster; I think, given more time and development, it could have been a somewhat more cohesive one. I hope that you enjoy it, and wish you all the best in 2017.


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